As a proud American, I work tirelessly to instill in my three children the mindset that free handouts are a scourge, inevitably leading to financial and emotional ruin. I believe in tough love, but still, love. The love gets particularly tough about ten days before Christmas, when I order my kids to walk the perimeter of our property line to put up the “Santa: Keep Out” signs that I made them paint when they were five-ish. I can’t raise solid citizens if they expect an obese, unshaven pedophile to gift them brand new netbooks every year simply for being alive. The signs have worked like a charm, except for last year, when I caught the jolly fat man in our living room trying to sneak a Wii U under the tree. I was about to pull the trigger on the shotgun, but I thought better of it as the kids cried and pleaded with me as they looked on in horror from the stairway.

Obviously, I also make my children politely return any holiday cash proceeds they receive from our socialist relatives, along with a handwritten note explaining why they are not worth the X number of dollars they have been given for doing nothing. Of course, we also send along our family Christmas photo. If any aforementioned relatives are reading this, you may have noticed that in said photo, there are apparently scores of wrapped Christmas presents under the tree behind us. Don’t worry, though. Those boxes are empty, for use as dummy props solely to spice up the shot. (Yes, I admit it’s a bit mean to have empty boxes awaiting my children on Christmas morning, but learning to cope with getting your hopes dashed is an invaluable life skill.)

Once 2 Guns, a film with a middling script and marginally interesting premise at best, was somehow gifted the dual box office dynamos of Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg, it was doomed. Why bother trying when you’re guaranteed to fill the theaters with nearly every demographic a Hollywood exec could dream of? Denzel brings in blacks, lonely housewives with secret dark desires, and guys who never stop smirking. Mark brings in whites, rave club go-go dancers, and bigoted Bostonians with Jewish-sounding names.

There are red flags right from the start that this is a shoddily constructed production. The first scene is a great one, featuring the ebony and ivory leads in the throes of a humorous banter regarding what type of eggs to order for breakfast. However, as you’re watching, you’ll begin to suspect, correctly, that this scene is by far the best in the whole movie and is not the first event to occur chronologically. The opening sequence was adapted into its role as opening sequence purely to draw you in with false hopes.

It doesn’t seem like anyone involved with 2 Guns really cared about the final product, and this is not due to Denzel and Mark’s expertise in the art of nonchalance. This movie has a very complicated plot (we’ll get to that), but the actors’ emotions never ebb and flow with the peaks and valleys of the story, so the audience is left to their own devices to interpret the relative significance of whatever we just witnessed. The actors didn’t seem to “get the gist” of many of their scenes. It seems like the director explained what was going on, then the actors said “Yea, I get it,” when they really had no idea and just wanted to move production along and take an early lunch. Then, when they finished the scene, the director probably wanted to do another take, but then thought “Screw it, I don’t wanna piss off Marky Mark.” The result is a film not only devoid of emotion, but also the “attitude” that could have been easily provided by the two super-cool lead actors, if only they had put in an extra thirty minutes of work per day. This will surely be the only Denzel Washington-Mark Wahlberg buddy flick we will ever see, and the fact that it is so unmemorable is a true shame.

There’s no way anybody read the entire script. If they did, it would have surely induced brain hemorrhaging. The chap with whom I currently duel, currently hidden from your view via JavaScript, claims he was able to follow along the whole time, while I was quietly pondering if 2 Guns has the most complex plot I have ever witnessed. I guess that’s why he bangs dimes and I’m left trolling for cyber-relationships on unofficial True Blood fan sites.

The very basic setup is as such: Denzel and Mark are undercover agents for two different government agencies, unbeknownst to each other (if I go any further on this point, your head will explode long before I finish the paragraph). They thus have different motivations, but cooperate in the robbery of what they believe will be $3 million from a bank. To their surprise, their take is closer to $43 million, setting up the intrigue for the rest of the movie. Though I really have no idea, this differentiation between two very large sums of money may be the root of the film’s excessive complexity. You’re left wondering if the characters interested in/involved with the $3 million sum are the same people interested in/involved with the $43 million sum, and vice versa. Is the $3 million a subset of the $43 million, or is it one unified batch of cash? You’ll spend an inordinate amount of mental energy trying to parse the various “what ifs” related to how things would have gone down differently if the dollar amount was flipped, or if it ever really mattered.

Even if you manage to plow your head through the multiple double and triple-crosses, it will be tough to ignore the numerous screenplay contrivances, such as people always showing up at exactly the right/wrong place at exactly the right/wrong time, or Mark driving through the steel gate of a heavily guarded military installation in a thirty year old minivan. Still, you could easily forgive those shortcomings as well, because ultimately, you’re paying to see Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg duke it out on the silver screen. What could be better? Unfortunately, the answer is almost anything.